


Colour

by Merixcil



Series: ReyLo Week 2018 [1]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-23
Updated: 2018-04-23
Packaged: 2021-03-03 20:21:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,384
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24771547
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Merixcil/pseuds/Merixcil
Summary: Colour is everything not absorbed, everything pumped back out into the universe.
Relationships: Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Series: ReyLo Week 2018 [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1791526
Kudos: 1





	Colour

Colour is everything not absorbed, everything pumped back out into the universe. Black absorbs everything, green just everything that isn’t green and white takes nothing. There is always an inverse to everything seen, something that sucks in everything else.

Rey starts out in the brown, the colour of the desert sands that never quite have the good graces to turn to rich orange on her side of Jakku. Brown is an easy training ground for her, it comes in such a wide variety of shades, from the deep earthy tones of what little leather she can scrape together to the pale, almost pretty brown of the cloth she makes her clothes from. Hiding in the desert are scraps of grey and silver, the relics of the Empire. She takes them and she gives them over to Unkar Plutt in exchange for food and water.

She dreams of green, and wakes up back in the monochrome dugout of her old AT-AT. The sun scorches the back of her neck and throws the shadows of the dunes into painfully sharp relief. She doesn’t want this, but this is what she gets.

Ben grows up being told that he can have any colour he chooses. The white of senator robes, the blue of the peacekeeping forces being put together by the new Republic, the gaudy neon of the circus entertainers that are so in vogue on Coruscant. He hates the choice, or he hates being expected to know as soon as they’re presented to him. When the time comes for his mother to send him off to his uncle, unsure of what else she’s supposed to do to fight the rising black within him, he’s happy to take on the brown mantle of a Jedi.

And for a while they are both brown. Her in the baking hot heat of a world that is almost the same colour as her. He on a planet build of living green ocean and grass, the vibrant blue of the first lightsabre he builds.

But there’s still black building at the back of his mind, in the stone cold centre of his heart. It sucks in everything else, slowly but surely. It doesn’t matter how many different colour lights you shine on to a black background, it swallows them all with frightening certainty.

Rey sleeps and dreams of a peaceful place, a green island set into a stormy grey ocean. Ben dreams of dazzling bright colours, of presents brought back from the edge of space by his father and of the rainbow coloured operas his mother would take him to when she had the time.

The stars were never the same for the two of them, never in line. Yet they would stare up at the deep inky blue, the not quite black, and each would imagine that someone was staring back at them.

When Ben wakes in the middle of the night to find the green light of his uncle’s lightsabre hovering over him, he decides he’s had enough of waiting for the dark to swallow him down. He doesn’t hesitate, he lets the black tongues of the fire that has always been burning, unattended in his chest flare up and wrap him in something more powerful than he could ever hope to be, more terrible. The power is astonishing, once every other colour has been ripped out of him he no longer has to give anything back. No longer a reflection of everything poured on to him, he drags people and power and planets and systems into his orbit. He swears himself to a master so much better at this than he and while this is not peace it’s so much better than eternal indecision. Darkness is absolution, the Force shall free him.

For Rey, the shedding of her exoskeleton is more subtle. She can barely breathe when she first sees Takodana. She doesn’t know where to place all that green, reflecting back up at her. Every time she blinks she expects it to vanish, she can’t believe that it doesn’t fade from her eyes.

She can’t shake the phantom instinct that there is something wrong with this much green. So wonderful, so beautiful, and so not what she had expected of the Galaxy beyond Jakku. She dives into the comforting brown halls of the crypt below Maz’s castle and reaches for something bigger than herself, she reaches for power.

Rey reaches for something blue. And the hectic array of images that suggest themselves to her in its wake are full of it. She can feel it clawing at her throat, trying to get inside her. She doesn’t want it. She doesn’t know what to do with it.

She gets captures by a hulking dark thing that dresses in black and refuses to be a monster. The only part of its true nature that it dares reveal is the crackling red lightsabre, meant to bring death upon anyone who finds themselves on its opposing end.

In the old Jedi order, these colours meant something. Now, all Rey sees is the danger. Hours later, she is reunited with the blue, refusing to think about how history overwrote the previous owner in a tirade of blood. The muddle of blue and red in the forest creates a haze of purple that sticks in both their memories with frightening accuracy, relayed over and over until they can relive the night together in dreams.

Ben is no longer Ben. He hid the name away, let the black pluck it from his hands. He retreats back into the dark and keeps the deep purple bruises that mar his skin after the fight away from prying eyes.

When Rey goes to the island, the green and blue place that had looked so peaceful in dreams, she doesn’t change into the brown robes of a Jedi. It feels somewhat pointless under the circumstances. She listens to Luke’s manifesto on the hubris of the Jedi but she can hear the gentle plea beneath the words, a desperate hope that she will be a clean slate. Something bright and white and easy.

She disappoints him. His approval counts for nothing. The green of his lightsabre has long since been put away and he is left in the lurch, beyond where Rey can reach him. She turns tail and runs back towards the black, trying to pull her in, trying to absorb her from the Resistance and never give her back.

There is a room painted red, with shining dark floors and a throne in which a would-be emperor sits dressed in gold. Ben knows this room all too well, Rey doesn’t know the half of it. But red means blood and sooner or later all little girls have to grow up. The flash of blue when her lightsabre ignites is brilliant and out of place and the disturbance to the carefully crafted pallet of this place breaks the false sense of peace. This time when they fight they do it together, and there is no purple haze, just two points of blue and red light moving in and out of each other’s orbit, not thinking much further than the end of their next swipe.

When they’re done, Ben holds out his hand and asks her to join him. Once upon a time he had had all the choice in the world and in the end the choice had been made for him. Rey is just starting to see the full extent of all that she could be, the limitless range of hues her future holds. So she tells him no and tries to pretend she can’t feel his heart breaking.

Tries to pretend she can’t see his heart breaking, when the gangway of the Falcon is still down and she’s looking at him across a space that shouldn’t be surpassable. For a fleeting moment she can feel the potential for the pure white light that sits at the very edge of her heart, and she can see the blanket black that she would like to tarnish Ben with.

But the moment passes, leaving them each as shades of grey. Rey can’t stand to see so much of herself reflected back at her from someone so hateful, so she closes the gangway and waits for the heartbreak to pass.

**Author's Note:**

> This work was originally posted as part of a multi chaptered 'ReyLo Week 2018' fic that I'm trying to split up. If you think you've read it before, you probably have


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